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      Emerging From Covid, Small Theaters in Los Angeles Face a New Challenge

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      A state law threatens to drive up labor costs for the city’s hand-to-mouth small theater scene as it tries to emerge from the pandemic.LOS ANGELES — “And here she is, in all her glory.”With a clank of a switch, Gary Grossman, the artistic director of the Skylight Theater Company in Los Angeles, turned up the lights over the 99 seats of his shoe box of a theater in Los Feliz the other morning. The Skylight looked pretty much the way it did when it abruptly shut down in March of 2020. Planks of scenery from its last production, “West Adams,” were gathering dust, leaned up against the rear of the stage.Concert halls, arenas, movie houses, baseball stadiums and big theaters are reopening here and across the country as the pandemic begins to recede. But for many of the 325 small nonprofit theater companies scattered across Los Angeles, like the Skylight, that day is still months away, and their future is as uncertain as ever.“How long will it be until we get back to where we were?” Grossman asked, his voice echoing across the empty theater that was founded in 1983. “I think three to five years.”This network of intimate theaters, none bigger than 99 seats, is a vibrant subculture of experimentation and tradition in Los Angeles, often overlooked in the glitter of the film and television industry. But it is confronting two challenges as it tries to climb back after the lengthy shutdown: uncertainty as to when theatergoers will be ready to cram into small black boxes with poor ventilation, and a 2020 state law, initially intended to help gig workers such as Uber drivers, that stands to substantially drive up labor costs for many of these organizations.The new gig worker law mandates that all theaters, regardless of size, pay minimum wage — which is ramping up to $15 an hour in California — plus payroll taxes, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. While some unionized theaters paid a minimum wage before, many had exemptions from Actors’ Equity which allowed them to pay stipends that typically ranged from $9 to $25 for each rehearsal or performance.Producers say the new state law means expenses for many small theaters will climb steeply at an exceptionally fragile moment for the industry.“Small performing arts organizations are on the verge of disappearing in California,” said Martha Demson, the board president of the Theatrical Producers League of Los Angeles. “It’s an existential crisis. We had the 15 months of Covid. But also now the California employment laws; to remain good employers we have to hire all of our employees as full-time employees.”Many organizations have survived these past months with government grants, support from donors and breaks from landlords. But Demson said some theaters that were forced to turn off the lights may never be able to return in this difficult environment.The Fountain Theater held outdoor performances of “An Octoroon.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIt has all added to an atmosphere of anxiety for a part of Los Angeles that has often felt a bit like a cultural stepchild. For all its growth and accolades, and its importance to actors looking for a place to work or stay sharp between roles in movies or on television, the theater scene has been too often overlooked. There is no central district of small theaters, as there is in many cities: They are scattered across North Hollywood, Atwater Village, Westwood, a stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, Culver City and downtown Los Angeles.“Reminding the public that intimate theater not only exists but is essential to a well-balanced life in L.A. has been a challenge for decades,” said Stephen Sachs, the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theater. “We are always up against the goliath of the film and television industry.”Danny Glover, an actor who began his career on small stages in Los Angeles and San Francisco and was a co-founder of the Robey Theater Company in Los Angeles, described the theater scene as central to his own success.“Something happened in those small places with 50 people in there that opened me up in different ways, that made me realize there was something I could say in front of a camera or in front of a stage,” Glover said in an interview. “I’ve seen actors in a small theater, whether it’s in San Francisco or L.A., the next thing they are on their way to a career. That doesn’t often happen with the kind of pressures that are there when you are in a theater for profit.”Intimate theaters operate hand-to-mouth. Only 19 of the 325 small theaters have budgets over $1 million, and those account for 83 percent of the combined revenue of the entire sector, according to the Theatrical Producers League.“We are always underfunded,” said Taylor Gilbert, the founder of the Road Theater Company. “Live theater is not the best of models for making money.”Many theaters operated on the margins even before the pandemic; now producers worry about when audiences will feel safe returning. With the highly contagious Delta variant spreading, Los Angeles County health authorities recently recommended that people resume wearing masks at indoor venues.Demson, the producing artistic director of the Open Fist Theater Company, estimated the new law, which took effect just before California shut down, would add $193,500 in labor costs to her company’s annual budget, which now varies between $200,000 and $250,000.Many industries have responded to the bill, known as AB5, by lobbying Sacramento for exemptions. But there is little support for that in this theater community, which tends to be politically progressive.“It puts another financial burden on already strapped small companies,” Gilbert said. “At the same time we all support the idea that an artist should get a living wage. That’s the conundrum.”Actors’ Equity has come out strongly against exempting its members from the law, instead pushing for financial assistance from state and federal government to help theaters get back on their feet.“We think it’s a bad idea to have an exemption,” said Gail Gabler, the western regional director of Actors’ Equity. “We all want the same thing, We want the theater to open. It’s important for our economy and it’s important for our souls and it’s important for the actors who work in theater. But we want our actors to be fairly paid and work in safe conditions.”As a result, theater leaders are pressing lawmakers in Sacramento for legislation that would provide aid to help theaters cover the explosion of costs. There are two main initiatives: A one-time $50 million subsidy included in the state budget for struggling small theaters, and another that would set up a state agency to handle the cost of processing the new payroll requirements.But some small theater operators say that those bills would not do enough.“The financial subsidies would be great if they were written as a long-term sustaining line item in the California state budget,” said Tim Robbins, the Academy Award-winning actor and artistic director of the Actors’ Gang, a small theater in Culver City. “The real question is what happens next year when there are no financial subsidies left and the new precedents for nonprofits has been established?”The Fountain transformed its parking lot into an outdoor theater.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“For me the essential question is how AB5 went from a bill meant to address the nonprotection of gig workers (Lyft and Uber, etc.) to a bill that is bullying nonprofit theater companies?” he asked in an email.Susan Rubio, the Democratic California senator who is sponsoring the bill to set up a state agency and pushing for the $50 million subsidy, argued her approach would help the industry survive these challenging times.“Many have concerns and will continue to have concerns,” she said in an interview. “But California prides itself in taking care of its workers.”Grossman said he is hopeful that the Skylight will begin live performances by the fall. But other theaters are not as optimistic.Jon Lawrence Rivera, the founding artistic director of Playwrights’ Arena, which only produces the work of Los Angeles writers, said he was resigned to a difficult few years. Before the crisis, the Arena would fill 90 percent of its 50 seats. “Now, I’m thinking 30 to 40 percent capacity at the most,” he said.Most ominously, he worries that emergency grants will dry up as things return to normal.“The resources that we have been able to accumulate will disappear within two or three shows,” he said.The pressure to open is intense. The Hollywood Bowl staged its first public shows at the beginning of July, and in August, “Hamilton” is coming back to the Pantages Theater, with 2,700 seats, in Hollywood.Some theaters took advantage of the California climate and headed outside. The Wallis Center for Performing Arts in Beverly Hills recently reopened with a show on a pop-up outdoor theater it built on a terrace — “Tevye in New York!”The Fountain Theater, which has 80 seats, transformed its parking lot into an outdoor theater, and opened last month with “An Octoroon.” Bright red bushes of blooming bougainvillea offered a lush wall on one side of the seating area as cars buzzed by on Fountain Avenue and the occasional helicopter rumbled overhead. “Mufflers!” grimaced Rob Nagle, one of the actors, without breaking out of character, as a particularly deafening motorcycle roared by.There seems to be a resignation that many small theaters will face a hard time. “We know once the smoke clears some of them won’t be reopening,” said Mitch O’Farrell, a member of the Los Angeles City Council whose district includes many of the theaters.But Grossman said for all the concern — and the likelihood that some theaters would not reopen — he was confident that in the end, this scrappy culture would survive. “We are like cockroaches,” he said. “You’re never going to get us. We are going to sustain. But it’s going to be tough.” More

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber’s New Act: Activism

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      LONDON — Andrew Lloyd Webber, 73, has for decades been a household name in Britain for his flamboyant, quasi-operatic musicals. Now, he’s becoming known for something more unexpected: activism.For over a year now, Lloyd Webber — who redefined musical theater with shows like “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats,” and served for years in the House of Lords — has been harassing Britain’s conservative government to get theaters open at full capacity, at times making scientifically questionable claims along the way.This June alone, he made newspaper front pages here after pledging to open his new “Cinderella” musical “come hell or high water” — even if he faced arrest for doing so. (He quickly pulled back from the plan after learning his audience, cast and crew risked fines, too.)He went on to reject an offer from Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain that would have let him do a trial opening of “Cinderella” without restrictions because it left other theaters in the lurch; take part in legal action against the government demanding it release results of research into whether coronavirus spread at cultural events; and to tell an interviewer he regretted caucusing with Britain’s Conservative Party when in the House of Lords because the party was now failing to support the arts and commercial theater.“The way he’s done it is like something out of his musicals — it’s loud, it’s over the top,” said Arifa Akbar, the chief theater critic for The Guardian newspaper.A scene from Lloyd Webber’s new musical “Cinderella,” which is now playing to reduced capacity audiences, despite his wishes.Tristram KentonJames Graham, a leading playwright (whose “Ink” played Broadway in 2019) said approvingly that Lloyd Webber had become “a big thorn in the government’s side.”Theater has been one of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic. In New York, most Broadway theaters do not plan to reopen until September. In England, theaters have been allowed to open with socially distanced and masked audiences for brief periods, with the West End most recently reopening on May 17.But Lloyd Webber has, impatiently at times, urged the government to provide clarity on when theaters can reopen at full capacity, complaining that they were forced to remain shut or enforce restrictions far longer than other businesses.Now the government seems to be giving him the clarity he sought: it plans to lift most remaining restrictions on July 19.“I never wanted, never intended to be the sort of spokesman for the arts and theater in Britain,” Lloyd Webber said in a recent interview at the Gillian Lynne Theater, where his musical “Cinderella” was in socially-distanced previews. “But there came this strange situation where nobody else seemed to be.”Outside the theater, several theatergoers praised Lloyd Webber’s new role. “I’ve never been his biggest fan — I’m more a Sondheim fanatic,” said Carole Star, 70. “But if I see him tonight, it’ll be difficult not to hug him.”“I could cry at what he’s done this year,” she added.Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice last September at a socially distanced London performance of their musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”David Jensen/Getty ImagesBut others said they were glad he had pulled back from the threat to fully reopen before the government decided to allow it. “I admire his passion, but I hope he keeps things safe,” said Samantha Fogg, 25.Lloyd Webber, who participated in vaccine trials, said he had been driven by “a real sense of injustice” that theater has been treated differently than other parts of British life. He complained that in June, tens of thousands of soccer fans were allowed in stadiums — “everybody singing completely pissed,” he said — while theaters could only open at limited capacity and amateur choirs were not allowed to sing indoors. (Scientists have been clear that outdoor events are far safer than indoor ones.)The British government’s attitude to the arts was “dumbfounding,” he said.But health officials are not impressed with a theater composer’s opinions on the safety of fully reopening.In June, the British government released a report on a series of trial cultural and sporting events. The events, mainly held outside for people who could show that they had tested negative, only led to 28 potential coronavirus cases, it said, but the data had to be interpreted with “extreme caution.” And the study was conducted before the more infectious Delta variant began sweeping Britain.The report “basically says everything’s completely safe,” Lloyd Webber claimed. But Paul Hunter, a British academic specializing in epidemics, said in a telephone interview the report did “not in any way” say it was safe to reopen indoor theaters. (He said he approved of the government’s plan to reopen at full capacity on July 19.)When the pandemic first hit Britain, Lloyd Webber tried to show that theaters could reopen safely by adopting measures like those that were keeping his “Phantom of the Opera” running in Seoul. Those included requiring audience members to wear masks, doing temperature checks at the door and spraying theaters with disinfectant.Thanks to strict protocols, the composer’s “Phantom of the Opera” played to full audiences in Seoul.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesLast July, he spent over 100,000 pounds, about $140,000, to stage a trial at the Palladium theater in London to prove such measures worked.“I’ve got to say this is a rather sad sight,” Lloyd Webber said that day, as he looked out over a largely empty auditorium. “I think this amply proves why social distancing in theater really doesn’t work,” he added. “It’s a misery for the performers.”That event didn’t lead to any major reopening of theaters, and Lloyd Webber said his frustrations grew as Britain let airplanes fly at full capacity, and people return to pubs, restaurants and garden centers with abandon. Last September, he sarcastically told a group of politicians that he had considered turning the Palladium into a garden center so it could hold performances again.“I am absolutely confident that the air in the London Palladium — and indeed in all my theaters — is purer than the air outside,” he added, despite the growing scientific consensus that it was far safer to be outdoors than in.Lloyd Webber’s breaking point came last December, he said, when theaters were allowed to reopen for a handful of performances only to be forced shut again as cases rose, even though shops were allowed to stay open. “You saw scenes of people literally cheek by jowl, no distancing, nothing,” he said.“That’s the point I realized this government has no interest in theater,” he added. “Once I realize that, I didn’t see any reason to hold back.”He later clarified that the government had been right to shut down theaters at that point (there were over 25,000 coronavirus cases in Britain on the day the West End shut, and in a matter of weeks they peaked at over 60,000). Lloyd Webber said he didn’t feel he’d ever called for reopening too early. “I think everybody thought things would get back earlier,” he said.Lloyd Webber, who owns significant real estate in the West End, has been the most outspoken critic of the British government’s commitment to the arts during the pandemic.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesOther British theater figures, such as the producer Sonia Friedman, have also made headlines by urging the government do more for theaters, but none have garnered as much attention as Lloyd Webber, who along with being a composer, owns substantial real estate in the West End.Lloyd Webber, whose personal wealth has been estimated at £525 million, reported that it was costing his company £1 million a month just to keep his seven theaters closed, and said that he had to mortgage his London home to raise funds. But he insisted money was not behind his advocacy. “My main concern is to just get everybody back to work,” he said.“I don’t think money’s got anything to do with it,” Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey,” who wrote the book for Lloyd Webber’s “School of Rock,” said in a telephone interview, adding, “He’s a man on a mission and you can tell.”But Lloyd Webber has not escaped criticism in his own community. In April, it was reported that the orchestra for “The Phantom of the Opera” in London would be slashed in half when it reopens, with percussion, harp and oboe replaced by keyboards.“When I see him get on his soapbox, part of me wants to applaud him and part of me wants to take him to task,” Matt Dickinson, a percussionist who lost his job, said in a telephone interview.Asked about this, Lloyd Webber said he was not the show’s producer, and pointed out that during lockdown he had recorded a set of orchestral suites that employed 81 freelance musicians.Ivano Turco, left, and Rebecca Trehearn in “Cinderella,” which has been given a contemporary spin thanks to a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”).Tristram KentonLloyd Webber remains an extraordinarily busy — or driven — man. As well as trying to produce and finish “Cinderella” — whose book, by Emerald Fennell, the director and screenwriter of “Promising Young Woman,” gives the fairy tale a contemporary twist — he has been involved in a £60 million refurbishment of the Theater Royal, Drury Lane.Even as he explored old churches in Hampshire the other day, he said, he could not escape his newfound role in politics, saying that people would tell him, “We cannot believe that the government could have treated the arts in the way it has.”But sometimes he clearly is happy to highlight it. When the government set the reopening date of July 19, Lloyd Webber wrote on Twitter that he would add a special “Freedom Day” performance and a gala with proceeds benefiting Britain’s health care system.“I am thrilled,” he wrote, “that at last it seems theaters can finally reopen!” More

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      Critic's Pick: 'Seize the King,' Harlem Theater's 'Richard III'

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      It’s a tale that Will Power intends as cautionary, with cycles of history and human violence in mind.Have you been ravenous, lo these many shutdown months, for the layered richness of live theatrical design? The Classical Theater of Harlem has just the thing to sate your hunger.Ambitious design is one of the hallmarks of this company, and it is an absolute joy to encounter it again in such fine form in Will Power’s “Seize the King,” a contemporary verse spin on “Richard III,” in Marcus Garvey Park.The brothers Christopher and Justin Swader, old hands at transfiguring the utilitarian stage of the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater, frame Carl Cofield’s production with a set that is both monumental and minimalist, aglow with Alan C. Edwards’s canny lighting. In the gathering dusk, we gaze on its stony surfaces and square-edged sconces, and enchantment begins even before the show does.It’s a strange word, enchantment, to apply to the story of a duke so hellbent on his own sovereignty that he will murder the 12-year-old nephew who stands in his way — a tale that Power intends as cautionary, with cycles of history and human violence in mind.“The evil in men always resurfaces,” a narrator (Carson Elrod) warns at the start, as the stage walls fill with Brittany Bland’s projections of slave ships and war.Yet there is something inherently spellbinding right now about sitting outdoors in the dark with other humans, and the occasional blinking firefly, watching a performance unfold with doubling and dance.Alisha Espinosa plays Lady Anne, who marries Richard with close to no illusions after he courts her brazenly in her bath. Richard TermineI caught the first preview of the run, since the previous night’s show had been rained out. Because of that, some performances may have been a little tentative. So when I tell you that Ro Boddie, as Richard, lacks the charisma of a scheming antihero who seeks to draw us into his confidence — well, he may grow more comfortable in the role.The same applies to Alisha Espinosa as Edward V, the young heir to the throne, who needs to but does not bruise our hearts. She makes a far better fit as the calculating Lady Anne, who marries Richard with close to no illusions after he courts her brazenly in her bath — a makeover of one of the tackiest wooing scenes in Shakespeare. Kudos, by the way, for the costume designer Mika Eubanks’s neat trick of having Anne’s outfit in that tub scene stand in for frothy bubbles.This production is more adept overall at conveying the play’s humor than its heft: the waste of innocent lives in service of vain rulers, the need for vigilance against the resurgence of the vanquished.Yet the other three principal actors (Andrea Patterson, RJ Foster and Elrod), move easily between comedy and woe, and deliver Power’s complex verse with remarkable clarity. Especially in the scenes they share, they are fun to watch.Dance, a regular feature of Classical Theater of Harlem productions, is used here to extraordinary effect. Choreographed by Tiffany Rea-Fisher with her customary grace, it is woven more deeply than usual into the storytelling — as when we watch the death of the old king, Edward IV, enacted wordlessly — and into the mood of the performance. (Music is by Frederick Kennedy, who also did the very effective sound design.)Dance, a regular feature of Classical Theater of Harlem productions, is used to extraordinary effect. Richard TermineIt is impossible to fully separate the art of theater-making in this chrysalis-shedding moment from the relief we feel simply to be experiencing it. So I will tell you that I felt full in an unexpected way after “Seize the King.” To which, incidentally, admission is free.It was not perfect, and it did not have to be. It was live, it contained multitudes of beauty, and it felt like luxury.Seize the KingThrough July 29 at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater, Manhattan; cthnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: Serving Murder in ‘The Dumb Waiter’

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      Harold Pinter’s one-act play, starring Daniel Mays and David Thewlis as hit men, is available to stream live via the Old Vic Theater.Have you ever gotten stuck in a dingy basement without even a cup of tea to quench your thirst? Service these days just isn’t what it used to be.That’s the plight of the two hit men in Harold Pinter’s absurdist comedy-drama “The Dumb Waiter,” a trim and tidy production that is being streamed live by the Old Vic Theater in London.In “The Dumb Waiter,” one of Pinter’s early comedies of menace, as the critic Irving Wardle called them, the two men sit idling in a basement room of what was apparently a former cafe. They’re waiting, Godot-style, on orders for their next job, making small talk that highlights their differences. Ben (David Thewlis) opts to follow procedure, though he’s coy when discussing the details with his partner. Gus (Daniel Mays), on the other hand, has his doubts about their occupation and the way they do things. He wishes for less seedy locations, more clarity on the jobs and better hours. And he has many questions. When the pair inexplicably start getting very specific food requests via a dumbwaiter, the job suddenly changes.The Old Vic’s production of the 50-minute one-act play, directed by Jeremy Herrin, is as polished as an assassin’s gun. Well, maybe not Gus’s, since Ben scolds his partner for his grubby-looking firearm. Appearances are important to Ben, after all, and, this being a Pinter play, so are rituals. Ben is inflexible and exacting, resolved to the simple order of their usual assignments. Gus is more circumspect and increasingly uneasy about his occupation.Hyemi Shin’s set design — a gray, lifeless room with two beds — feels appropriately bleak and isolating. Waiting, as if trapped, in a room until you’re given the OK to leave? It sure felt all too familiar to me. The grave confines of the men’s basement room seem to suggest a space where anything can happen — from a murder to a series of communications delivered by a dumbwaiter.And that small elevator for food is a perfect vehicle for Pinter’s quirky doses of comedy: It descends from the heavens (or, rather, a top floor), deus ex machina-style, bringing messages that change the characters’ relationships to each other and totally redirect the action of the story. And Thewlis and Mays’s characters grow progressively agitated: Ben turns more hostile and resolute, while Gus becomes more anxious and doubtful.The symbolic meaning behind this play isn’t so easy to decipher. Is this a philosophical statement on two antithetical approaches to life, a parable about our responses to order and chaos? Or is this political, a story about what happens when you fall in or out of line with an institution like, say, the government? Or does the play exist in — to steal the name of another Pinter work — some kind of surreal no man’s land, a cyclical purgatory where the two men relive this same situation?I’d prefer to hedge my bets and say it can be a little of all three. Pinter’s texts so often make the space for several interpretations at once, even if they seem to contradict one another. And yet in this perfectly effective production I wondered if the play lacked some stronger sense of a perspective — whether there wasn’t enough space given for the possibility of surprise. Because chances are you’ve already guessed how this one ends. The dumbwaiter interrupts the hit men’s mundane chatter but doesn’t veer the production off course from its clear road map to the conclusion.Though it’s a small complaint, because even for its mild predictability, this production of “The Dumb Waiter” makes a presentable and enjoyable feast of Pinter’s work. Grab your gun: Dinner is served.The Dumb WaiterThrough July 10; oldvictheatre.com. Running time: 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Waitress’ Is Returning to Broadway. So Is Sara Bareilles.

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      The popular musical secured a limited engagement at the Ethel Barrymore Theater this fall. The singer and songwriter will reprise her role for six weeks.She used to be Broadway’s. Now she’s back.The singer and songwriter Sara Bareilles — who wrote the music and lyrics for the musical “Waitress” — will return as the protagonist, Jenna Hunterson, from Sept. 2 through Oct. 17.The show will continue to run after that, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, through Jan. 9, 2022. After a wildly successful debut at the Brooks Atkinson Theater in April 2016, the show spent four years on Broadway, closing in January 2020.Over the course of the show’s run, Bareilles has periodically played the starring role of Jenna, a baker and waitress stuck in an abusive relationship who sees a pie-baking contest as a way out. In a statement, she drew parallels between the hope and resilience within the show and that of the theater community during the pandemic.“With this change comes powerful motivation to bring what we have learned and experienced this past year to make something even more beautiful and more intentional,” Bareilles said. “Broadway is grit and grace, magic and mayhem, and I can’t wait to feel the electricity that pulses through all of us as the curtains rise once again.”“Waitress” was the first Broadway musical to feature four women in the top four creative spots, Bareilles added. (Its book was by Jessie Nelson, choreography by Lorin Latarro and direction by Diane Paulus.)“Broadway is returning as the engine that drives New York City’s recovery, drawing audiences from around the world to be wowed, to celebrate, to cry and to laugh again,” Barry and Fran Weissler, who are among the show’s producers, said in a statement. More

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      Review: ‘Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings)’ Is a Mangled Love Letter

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      There’s great pleasure in seeing the actress Jackie Hoffman take center stage, even if the play, by E. Dale Smith, doesn’t quite deliver.The actress Jackie Hoffman doesn’t so much steal scenes as first beat them up and then abscond with any valuables. It’s actorly burglary. The scenes usually seem pretty happy about it.In “Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings),” a new play by E. Dale Smith, premiering at the Cell Theater, Hoffman, an actress with a contortionist’s face and a wit that leaves marks, is typically savage in her attack. The production, a monologue with occasional interruptions, stars Hoffman as Ariana, an Italian American real estate agent and amateur drama enthusiast in Roselle Park, N.J. Kelly Kinsella plays Margo, an aggressively bland volunteer stagehand who has to ready Ariana for her big entrance in a New Jersey community theater production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”The theater has cast Ariana as Fruma-Sarah, the dead wife of the butcher Lazar Wolf. She has one number, “Tevye’s Dream,” late in Act I. In “Fruma-Sarah,” which unspools in real time, Ariana spends the hour or so before she needs to go on treating Margo to a litany of complaints as she nips less than surreptitiously from a flask. (Think of this as a one-woman, low-budget “Bottle Dance.”) The play is at least 90 percent kvetch. And happily no one kvetches like Hoffman. She’s a born ham, if ham were kosher.But if “Fruma-Sarah” is a love letter to theater, it’s the kind of letter that arrives late and mangled, in a cover envelope with a perfunctory apology from the Postal Service. It has a lot of lines built to force an insider audience to chuckle — like one about an all-female “Equus” and an all-male “The Children’s Hour.” Yet it offers meager insights about theater as a metaphor for life or role-playing as respite or why any sane person would want to put on a musty rented costume and bang out a triple step for friends and family in the first place.The sour 70-minute show is directed by Braden M. Burns, who is also credited with the original concept. Are the jokes cheap? They seem heavily discounted. Its politics, while ostensibly liberal, skew conservative. And that’s fine. Or it could be. Likely not everyone in Roselle Park votes a progressive ticket. But who thought a zinger about the “pronoun police” should make it into previews? As exciting as it is to be back in a room of people mostly laughing together, it is still worth asking who is doing the laughing and who is being laughed at. Like a very tall boxer, the play mostly punches down. It also gives Margo next to nothing to do.In most shows, Hoffman has played the second (or third or fourth) fiddle. Before the pandemic, she had the role of Yente in a Yiddish production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a larger part than Fruma-Sarah, barely. So there’s great pleasure in seeing her take center stage, even if the stage of the Cell, a theater on the first floor of a reconfigured Chelsea brownstone, has the approximate dimensions of a beach towel. But the space is too small for Hoffman, a woman built to carp so that the rear mezzanine can hear.Still, she treats the material with absolute seriousness, dignifying the bits that don’t deserve it, swerving into an emotionalism that the script doesn’t remotely earn. Better are the lines that feel written just for her, like, “No one has ever described me as ‘nice.’ Ever.” She doesn’t have to steal the scenes this time, they are hers already, even as she spends them hooked into a flying rig, confined to a chair. She’s a big presence, which somehow makes “Fruma-Sarah” feel even smaller.Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings)Through July 25 at the Cell, Manhattan; frumasarah.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Theater Is in the Streets of New York, if You Listen

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      Recent audio and walking tours provide a gentle return to spectatorship while also revealing overlooked corners of the city.It is so easy to forget. That native footpaths predated avenues, that streams surged where subways now rattle, that deer and rabbits used to bound underfoot at every grimy crosswalk. And here is another thing we may have forgotten during this past strange year: what it feels like to constitute an audience.For those of us still dragging our heels on returning to indoor theater, even as antibodies now power walk through our veins, a handful of new audio and walking tours — “The Visitation,” “Current,” “Tour Noir: A Dame To Guide For” and “Bizarre Brooklyn” — provide a gentle, socially distanced return to spectatorship. (Another, “Endure: Run Woman Show” in Central Park, just began performances and continues through August.) They also reintroduce participants to the hidden stories and secret corners of New York City, the places we have neglected or never even knew were there.Begin uptown, in Sugar Hill, the starting point for “The Visitation,” a dreamlike, impressionistic audio response to a real event: the sudden appearance of a one-antlered whitetail deer, nicknamed Lefty, in Harlem’s Jackie Robinson Park. The sound walk — on the app Gesso and created by Stephanie Fleischmann, Christina Campanella and Mallory Catlett — uses GPS technology to monitor footfalls, which trigger new tracks as a person moves from place to place.“The Visitation” is a sound walk that uses GPS technology to change based on where a listener steps.Daniel EframThe show acknowledges the neighborhood’s history, from the Lenape tribe to Gilded Age barons and beyond, and meditates on the vexed intersections of the urban and the natural. (That intersection was immediately visible in the park, where the tree canopy shaded condom wrappers and discarded face shields on the ground below.)Unlike “Cairns,” an earlier sound walk produced by Here, “The Visitation” goes down too many divergent paths. It has a particular fascination with North Brother Island in the East River, an extraordinary place, but rather far, at least as city geography goes, from Jackie Robinson Park. And Campanella’s hymn-like songs — written in the personae of a schoolgirl, a gardener, a wildlife control specialist — tend not to further the story or goose the emotions as they should. The show busies itself with classical allusions rather than reckoning with the dark and terrible comedy of Lefty’s end, a bureaucratic tussle between city and state that prefigured pandemic wrangling and left the deer dead from stress.All the way downtown in Lower Manhattan — in Zuccotti Park, where the tents of Occupy Wall Street once flapped — scan a QR code to access Annie Saunders’s “Current,” an interactive civics lesson and soundscape commissioned by Arts Brookfield and part of this year’s Tribeca Festival. Saunders and the interactive theater maker Andrew Schneider take turns with the binaural narration, deftly leading listeners through the Financial District, over to the harbor and back to the park.“Current” is accessed through a QR code in Zuccotti Park.Liz Ligon, courtesy of Brookfield Properties, New York“People take a lot of pictures here, which is kind of what we’re trying to do also,” you hear Saunders say through your earbuds. Then the sounds of the city, recorded on a particular day at a particular time, rush in behind and around her words.The vignettes, timed to play at the golden hour, are casual, edifying and candid, asking us to consider the overlapping landscapes of the cemented-over wetlands, the skyscraper canyons, the storm surges. “When things are demolished it’s hard to remember what was there,” Saunders says. “It seemed so solid, but then it’s like, what building was this? What was here?” Toward the end, the narration zooms in — way in — linking the city’s beating heart with the organs of our own bodies and questioning how, after so much distress, we might rebuild.A lot of the landmarks of “Current” also dot a sillier enterprise called “Tour Noir: A Dame to Guide For,” created by Jason Thompson, a gangling young man sporting a lavalier microphone, a straw fedora and a neckbeard. The schtick here is that the audience — six of us, on a scorcher of a day that gave new meaning to the phrase “sweat equity” — has gathered for a straightforward walking tour. But after only a minute or two in Hanover Square, Thompson’s guide is interrupted by Veronica (Sydney Tucker, shares the role with three other actresses), a femme fatale in rockabilly mode. She asks for help finding her missing husband. Or is that just a ruse?The acting is exclusively of the wink-wink school, and the dialogue is so sub-sub-sub-Chandler, it belongs beneath the Hudson. Of any of these tours, Thompson’s has the most facts and the least poetry. It uses the city as backdrop rather than text, with little feel for its actual terrain. Maybe that’s just the heat talking. Or the fact that a bird straight up attacked my sister mid-show. Still, Thompson tramps through the Financial District, Chinatown and SoHo with such obvious zeal that some of his enthusiasm, like so much street gum, rubs off on the crowd.Adam Rubin, one of the creators of what he and Alexander Boyce call the “ambulatory experience” “Bizarre Brooklyn.”Jonno Rattman for The New York TimesFor a more elegant stroll — so elegant that the creators, Alexander Boyce and Adam Rubin, refer to it as an “ambulatory experience” — cross the East River and arrive at 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening at the 13th step of Borough Hall for “Bizarre Brooklyn.” A walking tour and magic show, it leads ramblers, each armed with a small radio receiver, through Brooklyn Heights in the gray-gold dusk, pausing for local lore and occasional illusions. Generously, Boyce and Rubin have sprinkled the neighborhood with surprises that spring from stoop and fence and trash bin. (Some of those surprises are inspired by Samuel Hooker, a legendary card magician who perfected his effects in a nearby carriage house.)Like the other tours, “Bizarre Brooklyn” discourses on the New York that was. “Some people complain,” says the host (Boyce, on the night I attended). “They say, ‘Man, Brooklyn ain’t what it used to be.’ And that’s true. For millions of years, this land was forest.”After such an unsettled and unsettling year, these gestures to the land’s past suggest a desire for stability, a collective need to affirm what happened, and when and where. But “Bizarre Brooklyn” also reminded me of my own past, what it was to be new to the city, languid, aimless, falling in love at every corner bar, letting the summer night take you where it would. It also reminded me of the enchantment of being part of an audience again, sharing in private transmission and mutual delight.“Bizarre Brooklyn” ends with a silent dance party.Jonno Rattman for The New York TimesTo this end, the host reads a few lines from Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” about the beauty of being alone in a crowd:Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a wordAfter a silent dance party, “Bizarre Brooklyn” ends with a cocktail — a terrible one — and a gentle goad: Keep your feet moving, your eyes open, your ears pricked. Because now that you can leave your house, wonder might be waiting for you on the next street. More

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      in Theater

      ‘How Do I Become Happy?’ Advice From a Professional Fool

      by

      Stanley Allan Sherman, one of the niche artisans of New York theater, makes leather masks for the stage. And the occasional pro wrestler.Everyone has a Sept. 11 story. The pages of Stanley Allan Sherman’s, a one-man show called “September,” sat propped on a music stand in his apartment the other day, amid a room full of leather masks. Something about the text was vexing him. “I’ve got to find a way to make it funny,” he said.Mr. Sherman, 70, is an Orthodox Jew, a professional clown and sometime playwright and director. But mainly, he is one of the small army of niche artisans who make New York’s theater world the anything-is-possible place it is. In a city that has everything, he is one of the few makers of custom leather masks of the sort used in commedia dell’arte, a form of theater that uses stock characters denoted by their masks. He also makes them for the occasional pro wrestler or rapper. It’s a living.He started writing the Sept. 11 monologue several years ago, with interest from Theater for the New City in the East Village. Then the pandemic happened, leaving the show orphaned — a meditation on resilience during one calamity, sidelined by another.For Mr. Sherman, it was just one more occasion for improv.Like many artists of his generation, he arrived in New York without a plan, and found a sweet spot in a post-’60s art world that was just taking shape. It was roughly 1973, after he’d spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel and a couple more in Paris, and his intention was to stay a couple of nights on his brother’s couch, in a fifth-floor walk-up on the edge of the Manhattan neighborhood now known as Chelsea.Mr. Sherman in the first mask he made, a trial-and-error process.via Stanley Allan ShermanBy then he had studied mime and the use of masks in the fabled Parisian school of Jacques Lecoq. Mr. Sherman’s brother was trying to peddle a documentary about the Cockettes, a San Francisco drag troupe; he was also broke. “Abbie Hoffman took a bath in that tub when he was on the run from the F.B.I.,” Mr. Sherman said, beginning a tour of the apartment, where he has lived ever since. Instead of leaving town as planned, Mr. Sherman grabbed a set of antique toilet plungers and headed downtown to Wall Street, to pass the hat as a sidewalk juggler and mime. It was a great way to learn about human psychology, he said. It also made him the apartment’s sole breadwinner.“I picked Wall Street and Nassau for a reason,” he said. “I felt, that’s the center of power, they need the humanity the most. This one fellow stopped me and said: ‘I watch you. I have all the money I want in the world. But I’m not happy. I see you perform, and you’re happy. How do I become happy?’”Mr. Sherman during his time as a mime and juggler.Jim R Moore/VaudevisualsSoon his brother took a real job on Wall Street and moved out of the apartment, leaving it to Stanley. The rent, stabilized, was about $350.Mr. Sherman graduated from the sidewalk gig to performing in the small, adventurous theaters that were beginning to open downtown. “If you stay too long in the street you get mean,” he said. “I was getting mean.” One day, the director of the Perry Street Theater, knowing of his training in commedia dell’arte, asked him to make a mask for the stock character Arlecchino, also called Harlequin.“The only person I knew who made masks was in Italy, and he had died,” Mr. Sherman said. He called puppeteers he knew for advice about how to mold leather. Finally, through trial and error, he made a mask that looked nothing like Arlecchino, he said.The director was satisfied. Mr. Sherman had found a niche and a community, the unsung artisans who make or fix things that no one else wants to think about.A mask Mr. Sherman created as part of a 9/11 series.Stanley Allan Sherman“The community of people who do this in New York is very DIY, out of the mainstream, and you get deep collaborations,” said Seth Kane, who designs prostheses for stage and medical use and has worked with Mr. Sherman on masks for dancers, under the name Dr. Adventure.“The performer says, ‘I studied ballet for 20 years — I don’t know how to make this fire-breathing unicycle I’m about to ride.’” That’s where the artisans come in.For Mr. Sherman, it has been an odd sort of career. His best-known performing role was as a guest on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” where he appeared more than 40 times in the 1990s, usually in bits calling for a Hasidic Jew, with or without juggling.But his best-known mask appeared on the professional wrestler Mick Foley, in his character of Mankind, a wounded psychopath.“They basically wanted Arlecchino but didn’t know it,” Mr. Sherman said. “I knew it.”Mr. Sherman, left, with the professional wrestler Mick Foley.via Stanley Allan ShermanIt can take Mr. Sherman a few days or as long as a year to make a mask, using the apartment’s back room as a workshop. When he works, he said, he tries to become the character. “When you’re sculpting, you’re moving as the character, you’re joking around as the character, so you’re putting all the energy into it, and that’s transferred to the mold,” he said.The finished product, he said, should reveal the actor, rather than concealing him or her.He is now hoping to revive “September,” his one-man show, maybe take it on the road. On that September morning 20 years ago, Mr. Sherman was on his way home after morning prayers at the Chelsea Synagogue when he saw a plane flying low overhead. The horror that ensued is by now achingly familiar. But what stood out for Mr. Sherman was not just the devastation but also the spontaneous camaraderie that drove him and neighbors, who gathered supplies for the emergency medical workers.“One of the best things we did is we gave people a way to help, to participate,” Mr. Sherman said, dropping his voice to near a whisper. “Someone came with eight supermodels. There was an old couple with a giant pot of chicken soup that fed people for hours. All these beautiful things happened. Then seeing the line of refrigerator trucks on the West Side Highway was just disturbing. People in their 20s have no memory of this. They hear about Sept. 11, but they don’t know how the energy in the city was so amazing. It was a magical time.”Performing during the NYC Clown Theater Festival in 1985.Jim R Moore/VaudevisualsStill, he wondered whether the monologue was missing the element of humor that has connected his work from the Wall Street sidewalks to the present, a pathway for communicating inconvenient truths.“This is what fools do: They expose truths,” he said. It was an imperative that has guided him for half a century, and a filter through which to see the city he has made his own. “The reason late night comedy talk shows are so popular and so many people get their news from them, is because they’re speaking truth,” he said.“If it’s a lie, it’s not funny. Lies aren’t funny. Truth is funny.” More